


The Janus Perspective

by archea2



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, First Kiss, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Past and Present, Step-Sibling Incest, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 03:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19715728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: "Life can only be grasped backwards; yet must be lived forward."S. Kierkengaard





	The Janus Perspective

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/gifts).



> Dear Syrupwit,
> 
> You said "any ship" for this fandom, so I hope this one won't prove a DNW! 
> 
> There's probably too much disco in this - I tend to view it as a common stomping ground for the guys, high or dry. Also, I couldn't fit in Klaus's dress code, but be assured there were frills involved. Glitter, mayhaps. A medallion necklace - who knows? Whatever floats this dreamboat.

What Luther knows: Janus, spotted in 1966 by Audoin Dollfus (“ _Not_ Doofus, Klaus”), is a satellite of Saturn, itself named after the god who devoured his children. 

What Klaus knows: Janus, too, is a god - of doorways, transitions, changes, journeys and rebirths. Or, in Klaus’s immortal words: “Forget about him and kiss _my_ Dollface, baby”.

What Mr Dollfus cannot know: a year from now, Luther Hargreeves will be hailed by the World Cultural Council, which he (Dollfus) co-founded, for his (Luther’s) findings on lunar basalt.

What the Hargreeves should know: they'll all have to come and clap, or else (Klaus).

* * *

Klaus can feel it when the hinges turn, slow, slow but sure, sweetly so, on their relationship. 

They’re pivoting to the tune of _How Deep Is Your Love_. And Luther’s looking like Klaus just hanged the (still bright, still a little kid’s Eldorado) moon.

“Oh yeah,” Klaus tells him. “For you, Bee Gee.”

Luther’s kiss is hardly more than the soft little catch in his breath. But when Klaus opens his mouth to the catch, pushing the jut of his underlip to seal the kiss so Luther can crack it open again, so tenderly...

… it feels like touching ground again.

* * *

_There is a rationale for Klaus’s homecomings. It is threefold:_

_\- The Academy has a roof to it._

_\- And is an Aladdin’s cave of gilded gewgaws, of a size to be stuck here and there on Klaus’s person, à la Diego & knives, and bartered off in a pinch._

_\- Also, Dad’s pissed off._

_Sadly, rational thinking has never been Klaus’s forte. Let us, then, play it again._

_“He always looks into your empty room,” Pogo says under a sly glint of glasses. “Miss Allison’s, yes, of course. Then yours. Every morning.”_

_… There is a hushed, brainless, hopeless why for Klaus’s homecomings._

* * *

He appropriates Luther’s neck with one arm. Pointedly. But Luther only uses the leverage to lift Klaus off the ground, gently, waiting for Klaus’s other arm to come around before he swings them forth.

“Gonna call you Bee Gee,” Klaus yells, recalling too late the sub-decibel mood. A few heads turn. Is that Vanya giggling? “For Big Guy,” he adds. Never say Klaus isn’t up for enlightening the crowds. “And because you rock.”

Luther stills to a halt. But his face, when Klaus pulls back, is fountaining with joy and awe.

“You… made up a name? Just for me?”

* * *

_Ah, those homecomings. Dad’s pecking order endures even when it is only Luther and him. At meals, Luther sits on His right and rebuffs Klaus’s attempts to swap seats with absent Diego._

_Luther’s hugs wane as Klaus’s drugs wax, because good luck wooing your number one guy with half of the Underworld perving on you. Until Luther finds him in his room, pale- and shame-faced, clutching the signed vinyl Allison just sent from L. A._

_“At least spend it on food?”_

_Klaus slams Frank Wilson’s_ Do I Love You _to the floor and leaves, never to swing by again._

* * *

“You want the Sax Symbol," Diego had said. "Smokin’ jazz joint - oh, very mature, Klaus. Cool joint. Saturday Night Disco.”

Great, only the raw lashes of sound hit them a block away. Klaus winces; Luther’s hand kneads the van’s door knob in trepidation “Just a minute,” Allison promises.

A minute later, _Heaven is a Place on Earth_ tiptoes out on sedate wavelengths, and Luther’s holding the van door for him.

The joint _is_ cool. It’s packed, yet Ms Carlisle’s voice trails a breath of fresh air, enveloping Luther’s leathers and Klaus’s nerves. _Ben_ , _Diego, Allison, Vanya_. Klaus sighs, sways with the breeze.

* * *

_Only after their life lines curve away from each other, following their hyperbolic fates…_

_(That’s how Luther sees it. Klaus would have drawn a wild squiggle in the air.)_

_… comes the affinity. Luther gets high on missions, looking at the world through dilated pupils and blissed-out cardiac rhythm. (If he hears Klaus’s laughter over the_ wow-wow-wow _of his blood, he keeps it to himself.) Klaus, cycling through the excruciating lows of rehab routine, thinks of Luther alone, alone, all all alone._

_“Well, he’s got Dad.”_

_“Dad, shmad,” Klaus says, hating Reginald for locking Luther inside his_ folie à deux.

* * *

“Trust me,” Klaus says, taking his hand before the Academy portal. “I’ve combed our options with Diego, not that Diego has any say in, just, y’know. To be on the safe rave side. What? _Not_ babbling. Hurray, here’s our ride.”

Luther adds Ben to tonight’s roster of chaperones. Wonders if Klaus expects him to squeeze his hand. Luther’s a bit of a squeezophobe, these days. 

“Look at you nighthawks,” Allison cooes from the chauffeur’s window. _Ben_ , _Diego, Allison_. “Luther, is that your old leather...?”

“Klaus customized it.” Luther curls soft-edged fingers around Klaus’s. “He knows his way around a wardrobe.”

* * *

_Pilfering Allison’s leftovers becomes a thing, half penance for thinking Luther would ever look at_ him, _half wishful staring. He shaves his calves; pierces his ears; plies his soles to her heels. A grotesquerie. But the mirror only basks in his quintessential Klauness. Klaus is the first surprised: he’d expected (feared) to resent Allison, not embark on some sartorial shamanic journey._

_It will be four years before Luther looks at Klaus’s skirt-clad, androgynous body and is felled by a double-trigger revelation: (a) Klaus is beautiful, and (b) maybe - maybe! - Luther doesn’t have to be a Nietzschean blond beast to be himself._

* * *

“Don’t move,” Klaus says, waving the brush. “Yes, you said light blue, but seriously, Luther, cyanosis is _so_ not you. Chrome, now we’re talking. Thereon a six-pointed star, argent, Captain my Captain America, sans the red and white.”

“Hmm,” Luther steals a pre-emptively stoic glance. If the dark gloves muffle some of - 

“No gloves, no glory? I think not. There.” Klaus puts the polish bottle away and slides his own palms under Luther’s as a resting place, warm, their life lines overlapping. Luther once wrote them a haiku:

Hands of my brother,

Busy like a solar wind

Please stay unquiet.

* * *

_Only after the not-to-be-calypse does Klaus accept their could-still-be._

_He teases Luther with_ Gonna cruise the hotspots for her? Unless you _fur_ got her already? _Braces himself for a... cushion (by family consensus, Luther is limited to soft projectiles). But Luther looks hard at him - tender-hard, if that’s even a thing - and -_

 _It shakes Klaus from the core, watching Luther hit the crumple zone._ You died because of me, and she used me to cheat on her date _. Even with Klaus’s arms (nearly) enclosing him, the tears fall on, sort of clearing a vision - a road for them to move on._

* * *

Strange, Luther thinks, how time first hobbles on a date night, each hour tugging back like a kid caught between his mom’s hand and his first-ever day at school…

...until it doesn’t. Back in Luther’s hermit days, the hours were blank and listless; the moon itself, a clock without hands. Now they quiver with brilliant promise ( _I’m to go out_ ), edged with a terror ( _out_ ) and a sense of tupsy-turvy novelty ( _KLAUS asked ME to go out_ ) that swirl his head into a merry-go-round. 

“Will you keep fucking still,” Five gripes, trimming Luther’s wispy beard with a dab barber’s hand.

* * *

_Then, events bloom at this timeline’s surface like rings of water on a lake, widening and crossing into one another, Venn-like. Vanya phones Patrick, who flies over with Claire, who gives her mother’s mouth a butterfly kiss: a war‘s chapter is closed._

_Klaus watches Luther like a mother hawk. But Luther ambles up to Dad’s cocktail cabinet and says, ‘Help me prep the glasses? I’ve asked Five to teach me the original Monkey Glands. What doesn’t kill you can stand you a drink.”_

_Moving on tastes of gin, grenadine and a brave-hearted wink. Klaus kisses Luther’s cheek; grabs a glass._

* * *

What Klaus knows: he doesn’t care that Luther is no longer the blond demigod that broke Klaus and healed him vicariously, when Klaus ran into another good soldier and let himself have what he’d forgone in his native timeline. 

What Klaus doesn’t know: Luther has come to see that there’s more to himself than meets the eye (the bulk, beastly; the pit inside, flipping that extra flesh and muscle into emptiness). 

There’s the will to reach out, take a potluck chance on being strong, kind and vulnerable - because Klaus finds it beautiful.

“I... yeah. Okay, then. Okay? Yes. _Yes_ , Klaus.”

* * *

_The time is April 2, Fool’s Day a leaf turned, Spring as crisp and mellow as a newly-minted waffle._

_In their garden, where Dad’s ashes grow thinner every day, Luther smiles over his watering can and Klaus pirouettes until Luther splashes him in good fun, only to still after the fact. Stilling, seeing - hopefully! - how Klaus has bloomed from_ skinny _to_ lithe _under Luther’s protein watch, his wet lashes clinging together like little brushes..._

 _“Go_ on _, Cabana Ken,” Ben urges from his deck chair._

_… his shirt clinging to his frantic partial foolish heart..._

_“Come dance with me? Tonight?... Please?”_

* * *

And so they let go of the past. But some of it clings to Klaus - aside from the ghosts that keep to the fringe of his personal space _à deu_ x - further apart, as if Luther’s bulk was a Not-to-Disturb sign. 

“Hey,” he tells Luther, sharing an Otter Pop between their mouths. “You know… that night I saw Dad again…” 

Luther freezes, popsicle-like; Klaus hurtles on. “He asked if you were all right.”

The drip-drip-drip of melting fruit punch answers him, until Luther crunches the remaining ice into his mouth and speaks around the flavour.

“I wasn’t,” he says. “We are.”


End file.
